Home

By Larissa Behrendt

A story of homecoming, this absorbing novel opens with a young, city-based lawyer setting out on her first visit to ancestral country. Candice arrives at "the place where the rivers meet", the camp of the Eualeyai where in 1918 her grandmother Garibooli was abducted. As Garibooli takes up the story of Candice's Aboriginal family, the twentieth century falls away.Garibooli, renamed Elizabeth, is sent to work as a housemaid, but marriage soon offers escape from the terror of the master's night-time visits. Her displacement carries into the lives of her seven children - their stories witness to the impact of orphanage life and the consequences of having a dark skin in post-war Australia. Vividly rekindled, the lives of her family point the direction home for Candice.Home is a powerful and intelligent first novel from an author who understands both the capacity of language to suppress and the restorative potency of stories that bridge past and present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Release date: May 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9780702258787

Book preview

Page

The place where

the rivers meet

1

1995

MY FATHER TOLD ME that the name of the town meant ‘the meeting of the rivers’ in the old language. We had set out from Sydney in the fresh hours of the morning, leaving the tame quarters of suburbia, crossing over the mountains, until the landscape bled into undulating black soil plains. The afternoon crept up on us, the distant mountain formation offering a craggy, blue-haze backdrop. Barbed-wire-fenced paddocks held flocks of cotton-wool sheep, undisturbed by our passing.

It is three o’clock in the afternoon as my father parks his car in the main street, bumper pointing at the steps of the well-worn Royal Hotel. The retiring sun sparkles red and gold, the light catching in flashing opal colours. A hot wind blows across the concrete, mortar and wood packing grit in every crevice it brushes over — between bricks, the cracks of window frames, between teeth.

I decide that I will go to the post office. If I send a card today, it will reach my mother by Tuesday. Although that’s the day that I’m planning to return, I can see her delivering a trim pink smile of thanks (Oh, Candy), and she will be pleased that I have remembered her. I can also see my father dismissing this with an Oh, Can-deese, as he rolls his eyes.

The air-conditioning in Dad’s large sleek car — I can stretch my legs out in front and not touch anything — had protected me from the aggressive heat and light film of swirling dust. I have always preferred the feeling of warmth on my skin to controlled too-frigid temperatures. I enjoy the stifling heat that now clings to my legs, underneath my skirt, embracing my face, as I walk across searing concrete. The post office is built with old burnt-red bricks and garnished with a wide verandah and white flourishes, defying the starching weather and the stretching time.

Inside, the sails of the ceiling fans click slowly, rhythmically. I pick a faded postcard from the wire stand, disappointed that there were none more parochial, less rustic Greetings from Big Rig Country or a flock of sheep: I miss Ewe) to send on to my best friend Kate. I look over a display of books laid out on a table, publications of the local Historical Society, mostly photocopies stapled together between colourful cardboard. I decide on a collection of old newspaper articles about the area and a book of one resident family’s memoirs. They arrived in 1904, the year my grandmother was bom here. I know my father will comment on my impulse-buying. I’ve bought something at every stop we’ve made today. Dad loves to dramatise how much money I spend, as though each coin is extracted from his own pocket.

On the back of my postcard of the town centre, sun-scorched and faded, I write — Hi Mummy, Hot and dusty; lots of sheep. By the time you get this, I’ll be home. Love Candy —and take my purchases to the counter where a homely, wrinklefaced woman with curled grey hair waits.

All this way from Sydney? she asks. I suddenly feel conscious of my suit and my leather shoes that clip confidently across the wooden floor.

Yes. I guess you can pick a tourist.

We get to know the faces in here. Are you staying a while or driving through?

I’m staying for the weekend.

Well, there’s lots of interesting things to see around here. There are the fisheries down on the river and there’s a pioneers’ museum.

I’m here to visit family, I reply.

Really? she answers, her interest piqued. If they’re locals, I probably know them.

Well, the family names are Lance and Boney.

Hmmm. Doesn’t sound familiar to me. Do they live in town?

No, just outside.

Oh, responds the woman, her mouth making a tight circle as she peers more carefully at me and then, quickly regaining her smile, processes my purchase with renewed efficiency. I have surprised her. She would know just outside town means the Aboriginal reserve. She was fooled by my light skin and has mistaken me for exotically Spanish, Brazilian or Italian. I’m used to this reaction but still it annoys me each time, like a distracting hangnail. I don’t mind being mistaken for someone from somewhere else, but I mind when the realisation that the dark features are Aboriginal is met with disappointment, confusion or even disgust. I mind when the person observing me feels betrayed by my lightness.

I return to the car and sit with my door open, the stagnant heat still floating against my skin. I know my father will be in the pub for a while. Uncle Henry will convince him to have just one more drink to quench his city thirst. Dad will relish the excited welcome he’ll receive as faces, known and unknown, crowd around for a free drink. Only such attention could make my father so flush with generosity.

I’m too shy to enter the bar even though I know Dad will be distracted and detained for a while. He’ll be talking about his work at the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and feeding everyone snippets of information about friends and relatives also living in Sydney. I suddenly feel over-dressed and self-conscious in my dark blue cotton suit, something that I would wear to court or for a meeting with a client. I’ve already attracted the gaze from a group of four locals relaxing on the hotel verandah. I can’t be sure whether they’re looking at me — so obviously not of this place — or my father’s flashy new car. Perhaps both.

I open one of the books I’ve just bought. The page falls to the writings of a clergyman who, accompanied by a ’black boy’, travelled through the area in the late 1880s. He had written:

And yet, it was a privilege to be a pioneer, for this is the life that has helped to develop characteristics that make for a real greatness. Friendships, courage, indominatable perseverance in the face of difficulties were the privileges of our pioneers.

I close the book and think about the woman in the post office and her stagnant, glazed expression that had, for just a moment, rejected me. A glance held only for a split-second, but the message so unmistakable. Perhaps she didn’t know what it was that her look revealed, what it was that I saw.

My light cocoa skin wrapped around my mother’s European features have allowed me to slip unnoticed into social circles, my presence never enough to make others feel guarded. Not like Kingsley, my brother, who, much darker, can never slip by. There is a price for this free access. I hear the things they assume will pass me by, things that would otherwise be said when I’m not there. I’m treated in these moments as though light skin is different, tougher than the person who wears it. But you are not a real one, thin pink lips will tell me, to excuse me. You’re different.

But I keep these interactions — these looks, exclamations, excuses and hints of disgust—bottled within me. The words — not a real one — work into my skin like splinters, making me feel as though I have Kingsley’s own dark skin wrapped around me. It is, of course, easier for me. I have these word-splinters under my flesh but Kingsley is undis-guisable, cannot be masked. No one will mistake him as an exotic southern European. I feel guilt about the way I can slip in and out, but I also have a deep envy of Kingsley when dark hands shake his in greeting while darting eyes flit over me with unspoken suspicion.

My father emerges from the pub with a cheerful Uncle Henry by his side, just like veterans on Anzac day, and I am distracted from my brooding. I rise and embrace my gravely handsome uncle, who had, in his youth, been a football player for one of the Sydney teams. Henry’s athleticism, all these decades on, still clings to him.

Ah, Bub, look at you, he exclaims as he pulls me against his chest.

Oh, Uncle Henry, it is so good to see you.

Your father’s been telling me that you’re causing all kinds of trouble in those law courts in Sydney. God only knows we could use your skills around here.

He exaggerates. I’m just plodding away, I respond, both embarrassed and pleased by my father’s boasting.

I kept all those postcards you sent me from Paris. Showed them to everyone around here who’d listen. Proud of you, I am.

It’s easy to see why you’re my favourite uncle. I savour the flushed feeling his attention creates in me.

He holds my arm. It took your father too long to bring you out here, he glances at his cousin with a reproachful eye.

Henry is taking us out to dinner. We’ll go check into the hotel and rest up before then, my father replies sheepishly.

From the faded floral bedspread in my hotel room I listen to the air-conditioner hum and hiss its secret language. Dad and Uncle Henry have remained at the small hotel bar, which is crowded with furniture but never with people. I excused myself, despite the temptation of Uncle Henry’s presence, when the conversation, blurry from alcohol, turned to the knotted web of back-stabbing and double-deal-ing that make up black politics in the city.

Uncle Henry keeps a distant eye on what is happening in Sydney. He travels there often. On these visits I steal him away for lunch or dinner at white-walled, glass-encased restaurants. I love being escorted by my tall, gentle uncle. He charms me with stories from his tin-box of memories. I listen, captivated. I notice admiring glances thrown his way from blue eyes beneath shy lashes. Other times, looks can be contemptuous, perhaps not meant to be so obvious, and once even accompanied by a shrill, unashamed remark. My uncle dismisses these incidents with a smile. I’m not so forgiving, feeling more protective of him than I do of myself.

It’s the egg trying to protect the chicken, my father would say. You can go on too much about these incidents in the city. I’ve noticed a short attention span for such things.

In my pastel-flowered hotel room, I begin to sift through the papers I have brought with me. I hate to leave myself without some vestige of work nearby, even if I just carry it, keep it close. I’ve already redrafted the affidavits and I’m making notes about the next step for the native title claim I’m working on. I have to meet with the representative of the local Land Council on Tuesday and inform him of the progress of the case. Preparing the evidence of witnesses and anthropologists has already taken two years. I also have to make the arrangements to travel out to the peninsula to take another look at the land.

I organise my work by placing it in designated piles, one for each task. I have two more nights in town and curse myself that I haven’t brought more to do. I make a mental note to ring Kingsley in the morning to organise further documents to be faxed — provided this hotel has a fax machine. I can trust my brother to be at work on a Saturday. He’ll grumble that I’m imposing on him, drawing him away from his own caseload, but he’ll at least respect my compulsion to do more, my inability to relax.

Kingsley’s temperament has changed over the years. As a child, he was as shy as me, but was always more eager to please and more popular. Somewhere in his travels through this life he lost his amiable nature; I think it fell away once he began university, replaced by a ferocious seriousness. But we have never talked about why this was so. I doubt I could ever bring myself to ask him about it. I’m too afraid of finding out what has taken the most innocent parts of him away.

I pull myself under the stiff covers of my hotel bed and return to my post office purchases. I open the pale lemon cardboard cover and read the introduction of one of my new books, though they are more like pamphlets. It’s a small piece written by a Mrs Cynthia Kerrigan-Mullins, the president of the Historical Society. Her great-grandfather owned the first general store in the town so she is well placed, she writes, to narrate the brief history of the little community. She marks the town’s development with landmarks that begin with the establishment of her great-grandfather’s store. Mrs Kerrigan-Mullins seems to think that the history of the town has been established from that date. It is followed by a postal service and a police station, a drought, a flood and a fire, the arrival of a train line in 1901 and the motor car in 1910. The only details added to the sketch are the refurbishment and extensions to the school and hospital in the middle of the century. In my mind, Cynthia Kerrigan-Mullins looks like the woman in the post office.

The book seems old, written with a tone from the 1950s, but when I look at the copyright date I see that it was printed in 1983; not new, but still thirty years later than I had expected. Well, it is the historical society, I think to myself as I turn to the first chapter titled ’Humble But Strong Beginnings’. This plots the battle of white men against the harsh terrain and unyielding, unsympathetic climate. As for mention of my own people, I find but one. Mrs Cynthia Kerrigan-Mullins has written:

Being troubled by the blacks and living in fear of them, a party was got together who surrounded about three hundred aborigines at the creek and shot down most of them, including men, women and piccaninnies.

I close the book, feeling the same deep chill I get when I find this kind of detached reference in history texts and contemporary media. It freezes me, like ice pressed against my flesh. I read the words, weigh them, over and over again.

Being troubled by blacks.

Living in fear of them.

Three hundred.

Shot down.

Men, women and piccaninnies.

Justice Lionel Murphy wrote about this history of frontier violence in the 1979 High Court case of Coe v. The Commonwealth. He referred to it as genocide and said that the aborigines did not give up their lands peacefully, that they were killed or removed forcibly from the land by English forces or colonists in what amounted to attempted, and in Tasmania almost complete, genocide. Genocide. It comes from the Greek geno, which means ’race’, and from the Latin word cida, meaning ’killer’. The word was coined in 1944, a new word for an old concept.

These silent injustices and the unmentionable crimes stain the landscape. I remind myself that these dark happenings occurred because today people are trying to erase them. I remember the little jibes and the answers from back in my childhood. There they laughed at this killing with an innocence that was shocking and shameful…

Did they kill the Aborigines? asked the small, angular, dark- haired boy, his big eyes quizzical.

Yes, replied the teacher, her brow furrowed with the gravity of the subject, yes they did.

Good, squealed the beautifully sculpted lemon-haired girl, sitting at the back of the class, there are too many of them.

Embarrassed laughter trickled amongst my classmates, lapping against my burning ears. In silence, I stared at the front of the class, water swimming in my eyes.

I would confide my humiliation and hurt to my closest friend, Kate. Kate is now living in Charmony, France, with a ski instructor she met on a train from Brussels to Amsterdam. Kate would have listened to me explain and complain about Cynthia Kerrigan-Mullins with patient attention.

Kingsley and I were raised in a mostly white suburban neighbourhood on the southern outskirts of Sydney. We were the only dark children in school — kindergarten, primary and high school. I liked to speak out, in my martyr voice, about the dead black voices buried beneath the heroic tales of white men struggling to cross craggy mountain ranges to discover inland treasures — land, gold, caves and lakes: I hope they let the Aborigines know that the mountain range was there when they discovered it. Hateful eyes would aim in my direction, as though I had given away the end of a suspenseful story. I shrugged off their hostility; I felt ashamed for the golden children and said as much to Kate during our soulful talks in the library corner.

Such rebelliousness is liberating but it’s also isolating. I didn’t mind; I had Kate. And when she wasn’t there, I was always able, through books, to be carried to imagined worlds where cruelty lurked in the most sophisticated souls and comfort could be discovered in desolate landscapes. As I slipped into worlds created by jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Henry James and the Bronte sisters, I had my own retorts and strategies to the restrained or bubbling emotions of the characters I met. None of them, in my mind, mistook me as exoti-cally Other. No mention was made of my skin colour. My romanticism would have surprised anyone who knew my cynical self, except Kate, my sharer of secrets, loves and fears.

I had my own clash of wills with Mr Darcy, Mr Rochester, and Heathcliff — especially Heathcliff, whose wild legacy of malice and revenge inexplicably drew me in. I always felt that if I had known him, if I were there in the house when he arrived, if I were Catherine, I could have made him happy and set his demons free. I understood the meanness that grew out of him, how the crimes of one generation leave a legacy of bitterness and the stigma of prejudice and, for some, the hope of reconciliation. I relished a passionate, epic struggle and a calm hope-filled ending, a triumph.

My brother fared better within the concrete walls and black lace iron of the school. His skill in sports — leading try-scorer in football — provided an effective antidote to unpopularity. The good in him was considered by others to be there despite his blackness, but not his athleticism, as though his Aboriginality carried a special sporting gene. This magical gene must have skipped me, the lover of words on pages. I would watch Kingsley slam his flesh against other bodies into the soil, his teammates yelling and playfully smacking his strong, broad back, blowing with weighty breaths as together they strode triumphant from the field. I would stand back, watching lovingly, as he won acceptance in the public arena.

As a sensitive child, Kingsley had become quite skilled at avoiding confrontation. If he couldn’t forgive, Kingsley could push things to the furthermost regions of his mind, to barren desert plains, a place where things could be abandoned to eventually die. He was uncomfortable with my aggressiveness, my unwillingness to let go, I could tell. He had heard unkind things about me and seen messages scrawled on the toilet doors at school that he hoped were not true. These things he also pushed aside. He wanted a corner for silence, a place for introspective peace. He had wished back then that I would be more like him — less confrontational, less angry — but as we grew older we turned more and more to each other and grudgingly began to appreciate each other’s once annoying and puzzling differences and attitudes. We both developed a need to understand the world we lived in — a world of rising deaths in custody and cyclical poverty — and we sought a way to change it.

From high school, we reached for the knowledge of law. I grabbed it with passionate and explosive enthusiasm, Kingsley, my quiet, thoughtful brother, with measured, analytical determination. In just a few years I became disheartened by realities that I had hoped were not possible: ever increasing incarceration rates and police officers caught on videotape at a party parodying the deaths of Aboriginal prisoners.

Kingsley grew more reclusive and secretive; he no longer sought acceptance, just his corner and place of peace. He stopped playing football and would spend his weekends reading, studying and writing. I found it harder to engage him in conversation unless we were talking about work. Our abilities, like our personalities, complemented rather than clashed as we lived within the walls of our shared understanding, as though we were under a protective shell. Joining each other in legal practice seemed inevitable with our shared fervour, complementing skills and dislike of the thought of facing the rough, rarely yielding political arena of Indigenous rights alone.

Law is a language. It becomes less mysterious the more you study it and speak it. You come to understand what the jargon means and how the arguments counter each other. You can understand how power flows through society if you understand the power of legal rhetoric. Legal language is bewildering until it becomes familiar, falling into place, and you then can use the words, get comfortable with them and employ them to show that you belong, that you have mastered the language. Then you rarely, if ever, stop to notice the bewilderment on the faces of others. It is too ambitious to think that you are going to change the world if you understand the language — and you have to be careful that the language does not seduce you — but you are better able to recognise what is going on, to find a name for it. It is just a matter of putting flesh on a skeleton. Justice Brennan put it like that in the Mabo case. He said that the court cannot change the principles of law, like the doctrine of terra nullius, just so that they fit in with the values that we have in contemporary society, if the change would fracture the skeleton of principle which gives the body of our laws its shape and consistency. The Court cannot depart from its established principles, he said, where the departure would fracture this skeleton of principle.

So you have to find a way to put the flesh on while keeping the skeleton intact. Kingsley says that this is not the point of the case, that it is simply a justification for finding native title when it was not recognised before and that I am dwelling too much on the excuses. But I believe you can tell a lot about people from the way they make up an excuse, the way they seek to justify things.

I love Kingsley, my dark, moody counterpart, most in all the world. I had achingly missed him while I was studying in Paris. He could not understand my decision to go away for a year. There was so much to do, he had said simply. He was right, of course, but I needed the time to step back, to think through larger issues, to explore myself, to try to regain my idealism that seemed to have crumpled so quickly when faced with the enormity of the task of law reform ahead. I thrived on the practical, day-to-day litigation but something in me had always wanted to take some time to think about the bigger picture, to return to my youthful ideals and their promised hopes. When I was given the chance to study on an international law program in France, I took it. No one seemed to understand my need to leave except Kate, my confidante, perhaps because she knew my insecurities and fears. She left for London, anxious for the chance to explore the better parts of herself and reinvent the rest, at the same time I left for France.

Paris made me swell with self-assurance. When the Parisians realised I was not Armenian or Algerian, my exoticness was celebrated. And I had met Christoph, whose cobalt eyes would look right into me, whose touch would fall through my skin. He loved me, I confidently knew, and I longed for him in a way that words fail to capture. But I resisted his offer, his insistence, to join me when I returned home. In Sydney I was no longer la Aborigine. I was a coon, a boong, a gin. He would hear the taunts about genocide, like, Good, there are too many of them.

And what of his light white skin and tall Nordic looks? I knew what people would say about me. I was already so light-skinned; he would make me whiter. I feared he would cause me to betray this aspect of my identity that had made me who I was. So I left Christoph and his deep undemanding love for me, as though it was something that could not transcend the winding, cobbled streets of Montmartre or the summer stench of the Seine. My martyrdom seemed almost complete: more scratches, more nails, more needle-jabs.

I fall asleep in the thin shell of the rickety small-town hotel room with a far distant memory of Kingsley’s round-moon childhood face, stained with tears, and my attempt at consoling motherly sister words. This merges with one of Kate’s witty retorts as we bask in the twinkling sun by her swimming pool, then I am in the sanctuary of Christoph’s arms, our bodies press together naked in the dark, leaving nothing between us but skin.

2

1995

I AM SIFTING THROUGH the articles in the Aboriginal Law Bulletin when my father rings to tell me we will be leaving in half an hour. I smile as I replace the receiver. He is in the room next door but too lazy to walk over. He’s a man who has learnt to enjoy comfort.

I join him in his room at the designated time only to find that we are waiting for Uncle Henry, who will be another hour. I bristle at my father’s deceitfulness. I could work in the extra time, finish reading an article on native title extinguishment, but my father wants company and has tricked me. Kingsley, in such circumstances, would just retreat back to his room, but I am held captive by my inability to resist my father’s pouts and demands.

Give your work a break. You don’t need to be at it every minute of every day, he snaps.

Did you sleep well, Dad? I ask, only to change the subject.

No. These beds are awful.

It’s hard to believe that this is the best hotel in town.

Dad grins. Well, we could have stayed with Henry — then you’d think this was the Hilton.

Uncle Henry lives in one of the weatherboard, cardboard-thin houses at the Aboriginal settlement. He has several nieces and nephews staying with him. At the moment they number five. Some are blood, others he just loves and feels responsible for. Since most of the family’s time is spent outside, away from the house, there seems to be plenty of room even though two are already permanently settled in the comer of the living room.

I was uneasy at the prospect of staying with Uncle Henry. I’m shy in front of strangers and so many at once seemed overwhelming. I’ve been rescued by my father’s desire for comfort and privacy. I’ve had too many years of living like that, he says, his voice a whisper.

So what’s the plan for today? I ask.

When Henry gets here we’ll pick up Granny from the hospital and she’ll take us out to Dungalear.

Dungalear is the place where my grandmother was born. She died many years ago. Granny, who we are to collect, is the eldest member of my Aboriginal family and the last to speak the old language fluently. Granny is the cousin of my grandmother, Elizabeth, and one of the few people living who remember her as a little girl before she was taken away by the Aborigines Protection Board. Granny has been the link to our heritage for me, my father and every other member of our now scattered clan.

Granny is resting in her wheelchair on the back porch of the hospital, looking out over the burnt yellow grass as we arrive. A nurse with brown, neatly clipped hair and a spotless blue uniform accompanies our little party, guiding us to the patient.

Here she is, chirps the nurse. She was up early this morning. Weren’t you Mrs Boney? She had her bath before everyone else. And you look very nice, Mrs Boney.

The nurse speaks louder when addressing Granny as though the older woman is hard of hearing. Granny stares out into the paddock ignoring the perky, prim woman. I don’t blame her. Granny is a crumpled, leather-skinned woman with snake-like hands whose presence commands silent respect but she takes this deference with little acknowledgment.

Well, I’ll leave you to her, sings the nurse as she retreats, her rubber soles squeaking against the linoleum.

Hi, Granny, Henry says as he stoops to kiss her.

What took you so long to get here? she asks testily, staring up at his big frame.

I had some things to sort out this morning, he replies, the gaze of his dark eyes lowered to the floor.

You were dawdling, she snaps back.

Granny turns to look at Dad. What took you so long?

I’ve been busy in Sydney.

Huumph, Granny replies, unimpressed, her gaze levelled steadily at him.

I